when it comes to baseball most bettors will take a look on ERA, BA and RUNS scored per game. But those numbers are not good future predictors and can fool an average baseball bettor. Here are couple of Sunday’s games, that are very interesting:

Colorado (Bettis) at Miami (Smith)

Team

Pitcher

Hand

SIERA

xFIP

ERA

Rockies

Chad Bettis

R

4.92

4.64

2.4

Marlins

Caleb Smith

L

4

4.16

5.82

This game is definitely one of the first you can take a deeper look on. Colorado will face Marlins and Miami just changed their pitchers to start Dan Straily on Monday. They will start with Caleb Smith on Sunday and on the first look Colorado will have huge pitching advantage, because their pitcher Bettis has much better ERA. But as I said many times, ERA is not the best future predictor for baseball games and we need to take a look on other important factors and ERA estimators. And we see, that Smith has better numbers here. I would say, that Bettis numbers are poor and Smith numbers are average or slightly below average. Most bettors will be fooled with ERA numbers in this game I believe, but if we compare pitchers in this game, then I would not give any advantage to Colorado.

Arizona (Ray) @ Washington (Gonzalez)

Team

Pitcher

Hand

SIERA

xFIP

ERA

Diamondbacks

Robbie Ray

L

3.45

3.49

5.13

Nationals

Gio Gonzalez

L

4

3.86

3.04

The second game that is very interesting is between Arizona and Washington. Gonzalez has much better ERA, but if we compare other ERA estimators, then we see that Arizona will have the advantage. Note also, that this is a game with two left handed pitchers. Arizona scores 5.4 runs per game against lefties and Washington only 3.6 with very bad BA of 0.197. I rank Arizona as 8th best versus LHP and Washington as 28th vs LHP. But one interesting about Ray is that he lost all games in his career against Washington (0-4, ERA 6.65).

Seattle (Gonzales) @ Cleveland (Tomlin)

Team

Pitcher

Hand

SIERA

xFIP

ERA

Mariners

Marco Gonzales

L

2.81

2.41

5.56

Indians

Josh Tomlin

R

5.56

6.2

10.03

The bookmakers opened this game close to even. They still give Cleveland better chances, but Seattle is only a small underdog of 2.06 (+106) here. And I completely agree with them. An average bettor will probably jump on Cleveland at home for a very good price, but let’s check this interesting game. We have both pitchers with high ERA. But we have also one pitcher, who has much better other two numbers and I definitely give pitching advantage to Seattle here. Gonzales struck out 27 hitters in 22 games. Tomlin on the other side struck out 7 batters in 11 innings and what is even more interesting is that he already allowed 8 home runs. Second thing that is very interesting, is Tomlin’s record versus Seattle. He is 5-1 against Seattle with ERA of 3.74 and his team is 6-1. This is pretty good record, right? And an average bettor, who wants to bet on this game will take Tomlin, because he has very good record versus Seattle. But most bettors will also probably miss one very important thing. He played only 2 games versus Seattle in last 2 seasons and he allowed 17 hits, 6 runs in 11 innings. The other games were 2014 or older. Seattle is totally different team since 2014. And if we go deeper, we can check Tomlin’s numbers against current Seattle lineup. They combined 76 at bats, batting average of .329, 13 extra bases hits and 3 home runs. Three key players from Seattle – Cano, Seager and Cruz have very good numbers agaisnt Tomlin. Cano 2 home runs, BA 0.400 in 20 at-bats, Seager has 5 extra bases hits and batting average of 0.429 in 14 at bats and Cruz has a home run in 10 at bats versus Tomlin. Take into account that Cleveland scores only 3.3 runs versus lefties with batting average of 0.170.

Those are three interesting games for Sunday and I recommend, that you make an extra research. I just wanted to show you how you can look at games from a different perspective and especially you should not focus on mainstream numbers, that you get on ESPN.

Here are the projections for the rest of Saturday games…

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